Sometimes its challenges may appear so overwhelming that individuals break down, give up, or regress to a previous stage of development, returning to the mother in her archetypal aspect of nurturer and container.

People under stress often regress to earlier stages of development.

In supportive therapy, the therapist works to help the patient not regress around this phase.

But since the Theory requires that for any group of entities with a common property, there is a Form to explain the commonality, it appears that the theory does indeed give rise to the vicious regress.

One criticism of this is that it does not explain how the act of will itself occurs, and suggests an infinite causal regress; another is that it misrepresents and exaggerates our awareness of the movements involved in our behaviour.

Demea's argument is that nothing can exist without a cause, that the idea of an infinite regress of causes is absurd, and that the regress can be brought to an end only by there being an ultimate cause who necessarily exists.